Study: White Floridians Are Pretty Racist

Some white people seem to think the only way to be racist is to wear a KKK hood while shouting the n-word. That’s not the case, and often racism is more subtle and codified. So much so that a racist may not even know how racist they’re being.

Project Implicit, as the name would suggest, seeks to explore implicit biases, and over 2 million people have taken their Implicit Association Test which measures people’s hidden biases — negative associations based on skin color the taker might not even know they have.

Turns out that white people in Florida tend to be amongst the most implicitly racist in America.

The map above, via the Washington Post, shows each state’s white population’s implicit biases against black people.

Florida scored a 0.436 (1 would represent totally racist, 0 would be totally not racist). Granted, that’s slightly less racist than the stretch of deep south state from Louisiana to South Carolina just above us, but its nothing to be proud of. We’re more racist than Texas!

Though, the Post notes the data is not based on a random sample, and rather based on people who voluntarily took the test: “which may actually mean they are less biased than average. (After all, at least they wanted to know how biased they are.)”

“These volunteers are younger, more educated, more politically liberal, and more female than the U.S. population as a whole,” the creator of the test, psychologist Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington, told the paper.

Which is to say that this really isn’t a perfect measure of Florida’s racism, but it does tell us that any notion that racism is somehow less prevalent in Florida than it is in the cultural deep south is a lie.

If you’re interested in finding out about your own implicit biases, you can do so here.

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